'With wisdom both ancient and new'
2025's default voice. The Pope on AI. Why your jeans are always horrible.
👋 Hello hello,
If you’re new here and have come because you’ve heard about the juicy-and-useful deep dives into brands with great voices, scroll down and read the footnote👇. There’s a clever and super-cost-effective way for you to read them. Alternatively, take the scenic route and read this ‘fourteen’ of assorted brand-and-language-and-ideas-and-malarkey on the way:
Unfrazzle. The last few months I’ve been kinda wiped out. I’m sure that’s highly relatable1. Part of the way I’ve been unfrazzling myself is unplugging from a lot of digital content. (Nicholas Carr once talked about ‘ambient overload’, and the problem with digital information not being that one is ‘looking for a needle in a haystack’, but that ‘it’s a haystack-sized pile of needles’.)
Needles. Which is just to say: I’m accumulating shareable stuff more slowly, cos I’m being mindful of just adding more needles.2
‘Hey Bestie’. Or ‘Why Everyone Sounds Like Your Cool FriendTM’ by Joe Burns. This is 🔥. The funniest, sharpest takedown of copycat brand voice mush I’ve ever read. (When tone of voice was first a thing, every unoriginal brand wanted to be chatty and childlike, like Innocent Drinks. Then there was the ‘Artisan era’. Now, ‘most brands want to speak like an HR manager who sends too many GIFs in Slack’.)
2025’s default voice Acme. Ha! I love the Fictional Brands Archive. Logos from all the made-up companies that are created for films. Boy, are there a lot of evil tech corporations. Which got me thinking – are there any fictional brands with great tones of voice? And literally as I was thinking that…
Oh, cut it out! Someone3 sent me this! Severance’s Lumon Industries have their own Linkedin account! And it’s extraordinary! Less ‘Your Cool Friend’, more ‘Your Gnawing Sense of Existential Corporate Dread’.
Excerpt from Lumon Management Program (LUMP) advisory on emboldening exemplary performance within your cohort. (‘Just remind them what matters most: Quarterly Objectives’) Science is like elevators! ‘Ideas aren’t getting harder to find and anyone who tells you otherwise is a coward and I will fight them’. Ahh wow, this piece by psychologist Adam Mastroianni is absolutely packed with goodness. It’s a whistlestop tour of how science ‘really’ makes progress; it’s extremely useful career advice if you’re thinking of doing a PhD; and it’s a brilliant interrogation of how the metaphors science tends to use to characterize research – ‘foraging, mining, drilling’ – are unhelpful and limiting.
No, it really is. Look, I’m just gonna quote a whole chunk4 about how science is like elevators: ‘Science is not like foraging, mining, or drilling, where we keep doing the same thing and it keeps getting harder. It’s more like discovering an elevator left for us by aliens. At first, we have no idea how it works; we get in and push a button, and now we’re climbing dozens of floors in a matter of seconds. We excitedly calculate that, at this rate, we’ll reach outer space in a few hours!’
I’m gonna keep going because this is great explaining in action! Eventually, we reach the limits of how high elevators can go. But it’s all too easy to get stuck on the ‘answer being elevators’:
‘Professionalized science, then, may force us to keep building elevators even though we can’t get them to go any higher. Weirdos with crazy schemes for hot air balloons simply don’t get jobs; after all, they don’t even have a degree in elevators! Anyone lucky enough to stay in the pipeline has to apprentice under an elevator-builder, so building elevators is all they’ll ever know. Besides, everyone knows that you can’t get helicopter research published in the ‘Journal of Elevators’, and the National Elevator Foundation will never give you money to build one. And our esteemed elders assure us that elevators have an excellent track record and the recent slowdown in elevator progress is only because it’s harder to build taller elevators, so really what’s needed is more elevator funding. But even then, they warn, it won’t ever be possible to reach the stratosphere, let alone outer space. We must resign ourselves to looking for discoveries in the sixth place of decimals.’
Vibes. Sam Kriss’s theory of ‘vibe shifts’ is the best kind of gibberish. There’s Hegel. There’s extensive Biblical references. There’s a bit about why we’re always wearing hideous jeans. One of his vibe models is the ‘Monotonic Escalator’ which is frankly enough of a connection to the science-as-elevator thing above for me to include it. If you actually read it, let me know. I wanna talk about it.
Is it just… Ordinary? Copywriters I respect are sending me this manifesto from the cosmetics company The Ordinary. (‘Picture a skincare miracle / Not something which smooths or plumps / But which clarifies the beauty industry.’) Everyone seems to love it. But I dunno. Isn’t it just a regular brand manifesto but with poetic line breaks? I really like what The Ordinary doing – and I also really wish they carried this voice through into the rest of their writing. Whaddya think?
Bellend. My friend Joe Fattorini mentioned he’d unwittingly become ‘one of the people in the wine world who seems to know the most about AI’. I asked him to summarise his take. His email was so good I told him to Substack it. Which he has just done. Read for his lovely distinction between ‘ingenuity and intution’, and his ‘bellend theory of human creativity’.5
Holy algorithm! If ‘Nick’s mate Joe’ isn’t authority enough for your AI-assimilation needs, you might prefer the Vatican’s statement on AI: ‘Antiqua et Nova: Note on the Relationship Between Human Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence’. It’s… really good.
Wise humans. Realistically you’re not gonna read it, are you? It’s reaalllly long and stodgy6. So I asked ChatGPT to summarise it for us: ‘While AI can advance human flourishing, it must never replace human judgment, relationships, or moral responsibility. The Church stresses that AI lacks human qualities like empathy and moral reasoning, and warns against reducing human worth to utility.’ Amen to that.
Uh oh. I just heard from the creative director of a London brand agency that one of their copywriters has been finessing their copy by asking ChatGPT to ‘rewrite this in the style of Nick Parker’. I literally do not know how to feel about this.
That’s all for now! Thanks for reading. Now here’s the bit about reading all the Tone Knob brand voice archives:
‘The world’s biggest archive of thinking about tone of voice. Also, really funny’ - A subscriber
For nearly three years, I wrote regular deep dives into brands with great tones of voice. There are over 30 of them. (I still do them, but not as regularly.) They’re packed with goodness. To access them, you need to be a paying subscriber. My top tip: take out a subscription – it’s only $5 a month – then, after a couple of months, once you feel you’ve got the value from them you wanted, you should also totally cancel your subscription and go back to being a free subscriber. It’s fair for you, and it means I’m free of the burden of the needle-creation treadmill. Win win. Hit the buttons above or below. Thanks!
Also, very boring for you. Hearing about other people’s burnout is like hearing other people explain their dream from last night, isn’t it.
This is not unrelated to Janus Rose’s excellent 404Mag piece ‘You Can’t Post Your Way out of Fascism’. There’s just something about hanging out online, even for the good stuff, that feels increasingly problematic.
Sarah Farley, who writes the excellent Writer’s Walk Substack. (We’ll be walking together soon).
I know from ‘the data’ that a) lots of people say they enjoy this newsletter and find it useful, b) but almost nobody (<6%) actually clicks the links and reads the stuff. Weird, eh? Perhaps youze all just like hearing someone else be enthusiastic about stuff they’ve read?
I’ve just noticed that you have to subscribe to get the full thing. I might ask Joe if I can share it myself in a coupla weeks. (Joe? Can I do that? Huh? Huh? I know you’ll be reading this footnote.)
Though henceforth, I shall begin all hot takes in Papal Tone of Voice: ‘With wisdom both ancient and new, we are called to reflect upon [insert thing here].’